Summer has finally arrived and the thoughts of bored progressives and rabid jihadists turn to one thing, trying to destroy Israel. Yes, it’s that time of year again when hundreds of busybody do-gooders team up with hundreds of blood thirsty thugs to attempt to run the blockade set up by Israel against the terrorist territory of Gaza. They’re not alone, this time they’re bringing their most potent weapon with them.

The press.

Camera crews from CNN and CBS will be aboard the ships, as will a team from the New York Times. Do not be fooled. The press has, for many decades now, been the sharpest arrow in the quiver of those wishing to destroy Israel. Sometimes they have been duped and, often times, they have been willing accomplices in a planned campaign to vilify Israel in the eyes of the world. They have repeatedly stepped out of their supposed role as impartial chroniclers of events to build a “narrative” where one didn’t exist. From the Fauxtography of the 2^nd Lebanon war to the Blood Libel of the al-Dura case, it has been the media who has been willing not only to accept every statement of those intent on destroying Israel at face value but, at times, to help create a story where none existed.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics posits that, at a certain level, the act of observing affects the object being observed. This has become an axiom of today’s media culture. One only has to watch a news cast to see passersby stop to mug for the camera. This becomes magnified when those people aren’t there only for a brief ego trip but to achieve, through their actions, a very concrete goal.

Briefly, it needs be said that there is no real humanitarian basis for the flotilla. Gaza is not the poor deprived prison camp that the media portrays it to be. There is an abundance of food, the malls are teaming with people, and the water park is filled with frolicking youth.  There is a steady flow of non-military goods into the area from Israel and Egypt. The stated purpose of those organizing the flotilla is to create a provocation, a situation in which Israel is seen as the aggressor as an excuse to pillory the Jewish state in the world press.

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As the protests in Egypt have raged on now for more than a week, President Obama and members of his administration continue to practice restraint in their communications and careful selection of the words that are spoken.  Hillary Clinton has cautioned against anything that could increase chaos.  U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told television networks that the “complex, very difficult situation in Egypt requires careful progress toward a peaceful transition to democracy rather than any sudden or violent change that could undermine the aspirations of the protesters.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs echoed the sentiments that while Egypt needs to change, it’s not the place of the United States to publicly support or oppose the removal of Mubarak.  Likewise, most Republicans are also on the same page as the Obama administration, speaking out in support of democratic reforms in Egypt, yet taking great care not to back or oppose Mubarak either way – at least not publicly.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “I don’t have any criticism of President [Barack] Obama or Secretary [Hillary] Clinton at this point.  It’s important for U.S. officials “to speak as one voice during this crisis.”  As many have noted, Egypt is perhaps one of the only issues that’s rendered an overwhelmingly bi-partisan response.

But one man in particular is not exactly in agreement with that bi-partisan response:  George Soros.  And he’s warning us to toe the line – his line, that is.

The leftist billionaire who made his fortune on the back of US capitalism is taking aim at all the “rigid and ideological supporters of Israel” and “the religious right” for standing in the way of democracy for Egypt.

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Many people who are informed about what’s actually happening in the Middle East constantly wonder why Israel fares so badly in the information wars. The following example gives us a pretty good idea why.

Jawaher Abu Rahmah, a ‘Palestinian’ activist, died on January 1st. Saeb Erekat, the right fork of Yasser Arafat’s tongue, claimed that she died during a demonstration in the ‘Palestinian’ town of Bil’in, killed by “poison” contained in tear gas fired at the demonstration by Israeli soldiers after it deteriorated into what could best be termed a riot.

‘Palestinian’ President Mahmoud Abbas called Abu Rahmah’s death a “new Israeli crime carried out by the occupation army against our helpless nation.”

She was given a martyr’s funeral as a victim an Israeli “war crime”, with crowds of mourners and the usual Palestinian stringers who work for the dinosaur media in attendance.

The story was almost instantaneously reported around the world as fact by the AFP, the Guardian, The AP, The Independent, UPI, Voice of America, and even the Jewish Telegraphic Agency among others, while TIME’s resident Israel basher Tony Karon got off a piece celebrating this as the occasion of an alliance between ‘Palestinian’ activists and Israeli Leftists.

The real story? According to the IDF, there’s no evidence Abu Rahmah was even at the Bil’in demonstration, nor does she show up on any of the videos.

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A recent event at New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute is a prime example of politicized, dumbed down, parodic “education” geared to desensitizing students to the seeking of truth based on evidence and historical facts.

More exactly, this occasion – an opportunity for forty or so students to meet and speak with the radical cartoon journalist Joe Sacco after a discussion of his work with NYU’s Middle East professor Zachary Lockman – degenerated into a crude and perverse forum for smashing the very ideal of journalistic objectivity.

According to Alan Jacobs, a student of Middle Eastern Studies the interchange dealt chiefly with Sacco’s new graphic novel, Footnotes in Gaza, which uses comic strips to expose alleged Israeli abuses in Gaza in 1956.

Both cartoonist and historian, reports Jacobs, frequently repudiated objectivity, and their radical bias resulted directly in the reviling of Israel.

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Folks who watched CBS “Face the Nation” yesterday were greeted by a once-in-a-lifetime miracle occurrence: host Bob Schieffer taking a contrary position to one of the Administration’s talking points. Talking to White House political director David Axelrod about the President’s charge that the Chamber of Commerce is using foreign donations to support GOP candidates, he asked:

SCHIEFFER: Now, I want to ask you about that because the New York Times looked into the Chamber specifically and said the Chamber really isn’t putting foreign money into the campaign. That it does charge its foreign affiliates dues that bring in less than $100,000 a year. A lot of organizations, including labor unions, do that. But the Chamber has an annual budget of $200 million. Along with that it keeps these foreign dues separate. They do spend heavily in politics — $25 million so far. They expect to spend $50 million. But this part about foreign money, that appears to be peanuts, Mr. Axelrod. Do you have any evidence that it’s anything other than peanuts?

AXELROD: Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob? The fact is that the Chamber has asserted that but they won’t release any information about where their campaign money is coming from. That’s at the core of the problem here. What we’ve seen in part because of a loophole that the Supreme Court allowed earlier this year, we now see tens of millions of dollars being spent by the chamber and a number of organizations some of which just cropped up. Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove run one of them. Tens of millions of dollars from undisclosed donors under benign names like the American cross roads fund. They’re spending heavily in all of these elections. One race in Colorado, there are six different organizations running negative ads against the Democratic senator there, Michael Bennet. No one knows where the money is coming from. My question back to you and for your next guest is, why not simply disclose where this money is coming from? And then all of these questions will be answered.

In other words Axelrod and the Democratic Party pulled this charge out of nowhere, threw it against the wall and are praying it sticks, or as Schieffer said: (more…)

Quote unquote:

The truth? In the week that three Presidents, a King and their own Prime Minister gather at the White House to begin a fresh round of talks on peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the truth is, Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter. They’re otherwise engaged; they’re making money; they’re enjoying the rays of late summer. A watching world may still define their country by the blood feud with the Arabs whose families used to live on this land and whether that conflict can be negotiated away, but Israelis say they have moved on… Asked in a March poll to name the “most urgent problem” facing Israel, just eight percent of Israeli Jews cited the conflict with Palestinians, putting it fifth behind education, crime, national security and poverty. Israeli Arabs placed peace first.

Obviously that poll actually shows that Israelis are preoccupied with educating their children, keeping their families safe from crime, and not getting killed by neighboring countries. Ergo listing those as priorities one, two, and three. But why let mere numbers get in the way of “Jews are too busy ‘making money’ to embrace negotiations?”

And obviously the West Bank Arabs with whom the Israelis are negotiating are very explicitly not Arabs who “used to live on this land,” insofar as they’re Arabs who “are living on this land” right now. That’s in sharp contrast to the descendants of Jews who were expelled from Arab lands, and who are being left out of the “comprehensive” peace talks. But why let all that get in the way of eliminationist, anti-Israel themes? (more…)

Libya has apparently decided that, if they’re going to have a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, they’re going to own it. So in between using the UNHRC to spread antisemitic organ harvesting libels, they’ve dispatched a ship in the direction of Gaza. This is actually the second time in three years that they’ve tried to break the Israeli blockade, the intention being to establish a pipeline between Hamas and their Tehran sponsors and to build an Iranian port on the Mediterranean Sea. Because the Iranians, they’re humanitarians too.

When Israel intercepted the Turkish flotilla two months ago, it took five or six news cycles before the media’s beatific unarmed activists were proven to be lunatic death-worshiping jihadists. By then the anti-Israel narrative had already hardened, though Reuters gamely kept trying to hide the evidence and the New York Times continued hyperventilating about how “angry Israeli commandos” turned a “ship of protesters into a bloodbath” – just in case.

Now there’s this Libyan ship Amalthea, which may or may not end up reaching Israel. If it does, and if there’s a confrontation, the media coverage won’t exactly swing wildly in Israel’s direction. Instead you’ll see the same mostly lame attempts to whitewash the same mostly pathological jihadists. Except in this case there’s already tape on the whole lunatic death-worshiping thing, courtesy of an Al Jazeera interview with one of the passengers:

Here then, is the evidence that the media will be ignoring tomorrow, today: (more…)

Not all fauxtography involves doctoring of recent news photographs; sometimes news sources take an old picture and change the context which also is using photographs to fake a news story. For example the picture below was taken by the Associated Press on January 14, 2009, right after the end of the most recent Israeli war with Hamas.

Last week the UK Daily Telegraph ran an article about the Gaza Blockade, this is how the article looked:

Does the picture look familiar? That’s because it is the same exact photograph from two years ago.  This time the caption says:

The blockade prevents Gaza from exporting any goods, putting a crippling squeeze on the local economy, and restricts imports to a limited amount of basic humanitarian aid Photo: AP (more…)

Having been caught doctoring pictures during of the violence aboard the guerilla flotilla boat, Mavi Marmara, Reuters is circling the wagons and looking for other ways to discredit Israel.

Officially, Reuters says the elimination of the IHH terrorists holding knives in the pictures it originally published to its wire was an editing error.

Reuters is committed to accurate and impartial reporting. All images that pass over our wire follow a strict editorial evaluation and selection process. The images in question were made available in Istanbul, and following normal editorial practice were prepared for dissemination which included cropping at the edges.

“Committed to accurate and impartial reporting?” Gee, if that was the case why did they add biased captions to the pictures when they posted the non-cropped versions? As reported by Omri Ceren on Big Journalism earlier today the wire service added a political message to the pictures.

Pro-Palestinian activists hold down an Israeli commando on the Gaza-bound Turkish ship Mavi Marmara in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea early May 31, 2010. Israeli marines stormed the Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza on Monday and nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed, triggering a diplomatic crisis and an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council.

I agree with Omri when he says: (more…)

For what it’s worth – and like fellow Big Journalism contributer Jeff Dunetz – I don’t think Helen Thomas should have been forced out. Now that she’s resigned, the story can be expected to die. And with it will die discussion of how anti-Semitism is not only rampant in some liberal elite media circles, which is what Jeff ran down, but also how it manages to make itself respectable.

First a very thin silver lining, which is that Hamas is going to be grumpy:

Thomas:”Jews do not belong in Israel” – White house correspondent Helen Thomas told Jews to get out of Palestine. In an interview with her, Jewish man named as David, asked Helen for her comment on Israel, she responded by saying: “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.” Turning her attention to the Palestinians, she said, “Remember, these people are occupied. And it’s their land,” adding the Jews should “go home” to Poland and Germany. No doubt that Thomas Helen has told the truth that everybody in the world knows, but as American in a very important position , she was attacked by Zionists who went mad from the reality she mentioned in front of all people.

And it’s not like this fiasco doesn’t have an upshot when it comes to elite liberal anti-Semitism. But the point isn’t merely that many leading anti-Israel reporters and academics are driven by pathological anti-Jewish bigotry.

That’s true, but we already knew that. The real significance is that this is another example of the nudge-wink game that they’re all allowed to play, where they channel their anti-Semitism into ostensibly respectable displays of anti-Israel journalism and scholarship. (more…)

Last night I took a sickening trip into the Alternative Progressive Universe that is MSNBC and settled in to the orbit of Planet Olbermann with its toxic and hate-filled atmosphere.

If you ever have the chance to visit Planet Olbermann on any given night, you have to suspend all rational thoughts or beliefs on this mostly dead planet. Olbermann sought to boost his argument that Israel’s boarding of a so-called Peace Flotilla was somehow illegal and to support this, he brought on a satellite (Carter-Era Ambassador), Edward Peck. In falling within the gravitational pull of Planet Olbermann, Peck said that he was on a smaller boat in the supposed Peace Flotilla and that Israelis commandos stepped aboard the ship. As he spoke, Olbermann played video of Israeli commandos boarding the another ship via helicopter and being attacked by so-called activists. Nowhere in Peck’s five minutes of unabated rambling did Olbermann disagree with Peck’s notion that Israel does not even exist, as Peck referred to the region both as Gaza and Palestine.

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The first images of the clashes aboard the Mavi Marmara early Monday morning were broadcast by Al Jazeera English, which had an embedded journalist, Jamal Elshayyal, aboard the ship. What is remarkable about the footage is that the only attack it depicted was of the passengers upon the Israeli commandos, using bars and knives. The footage did not show the soldiers shooting. Yet the images were described as an Israeli attack.

The images were beamed around the world, inciting a mob to storm the Israeli embassy in Turkey, enraging anti-Israel crowds throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and inflaming Western public opinion. Yet the footage did not depict what Al Jazeera claimed it did, and in fact Israel was later able to use the same images to show the violent way in which its troops were confronted (the other five ships were stopped without incident).

Similarly, the infamous footage of 12-year-old Palestinian Muhammad Al-Dura at the start of the second intifada in September 2000 did not actually show the boy or his father being shot by Israeli troops. Charles Enderlin, the journalist who reported that Al-Dura had been shot and killed, was not actually present on the scene. He relied on the explanation provided by the embedded Palestinian cameraman who filmed the event: (more…)

The recent flap about Israel supposedly insulting the United States by announcing plans to build 1,600 new housing units within the sovereign territory of Israel is remarkable on many levels. First, it’s a non-story. There is nothing new about Israel developing new housing in East Jerusalem, for Israel has never pledged not to do so.

Second, despite the Obama administration’s repeated assurances that it will continue to stand behind America’s only reliable ally in the middle east, comments by key administration officials make it clear that our commitment to Israel is now conditional on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “good behavior.”

Finally, this incident signals a clear shift in American policy. Under Barack Obama, the United States now officially accepts that there is a justifiable link between jihadist attacks on the United States and Israeli behavior.

Yet, to hear the tired old mainstream media tell the story, Israel is completely out of control, deliberately antagonizing the United States of America. Consider this lead from CNN: (more…)

There’s an interesting piece out from the AFP entitled “Bold new Gaza play skewers Fatah and Hamas.”  Apparently, there’s a play out in the Gaza Strip that rips Hamas and Fatah:

A new play has shocked audiences in the Gaza Strip by shouting out what many in the Hamas-ruled territory mutter behind closed doors — that Palestinian politicians are a bunch of crooks. The biting comedy entitled “Umbilical Cord” goes after the Islamist Hamas and its secular Fatah rivals, accusing them of ignoring the suffering of their people and selling out to Iran and the United States, respectively.

The shocking part about the play obviously isn’t the content of the play – it’s that Hamas hasn’t shut it down and shot all the participants.  The question is: why not? (more…)